> If you are talking about conservative economists who reject> mathematical economics, then of course you are right. Such economists> have disgraced themselves as scientists in the name of political> ideology - as have for instance biologists who in the name of> religious ideology rejected evolution.>> But mathematical economists are at least as mathematical and logical> in their thinking as any engineer. Look at 2010 Mathematics Subject> Classification (MSC2010)>> http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/msc/pdfs/classifications2010.pdf>

Well, my characterizations were somewhat a caricature. Economics,like maths, is infected by the vogues of the day. We've recentlyentered the chapter on dynamical systems aka "life at the edge ofchaos" wherein the unpredictability in principle even of deterministicsystems is studied. This tends to give the lie to a lot of fauxmodeling, mathematical up the wazoo, but still depending on premisesof dubious worth. That's the thing: you can write reams ofmathematical mumbo jumbo and still not have a clue. I'm not one to becowed or snowed by a lot of symbols or lines of code, just because itlooks so "logical".

Economics itself has been changing, absorbing more thermodynamics,which says Planet Earth is syntropic, not entropic. We're riding asolar gradient and have the means to self organize, and we're doingthat. It's called our economy, but it's co-determinate with ourecosystem (economy and ecosystem are the same thing -- the moreenlightened schools realize that).

The Henry George school of economics has been a good source of ideas,among others. We've had guest speakers at our Linus Pauling House, orat the bigger theater downtown (Schnitzer -- moving venues for nextyear though). I've put together a mental model wherein the scarecrowgets a brain. It's called STEM (or STEAM) in my plot line /narrative. We go with the newer breed of economist that knows somegeneral systems theory (GST). We leave the 1900s in the dust, whereit belongs.

> and go to 91 and all its subsets. If you want to say that all this> mathematical science that is published in this area is not legitimate> just because you say so, then have at it.>> But I for one just don't respect science denial, no matter what the> science is - never have, never will.

I think huge amounts of BS masquerade as science, a major examplebeing the Eugenics fad that a privileged social class used to justifya lot of forced sterilizations.

Business tycoons were funding those Nazi experiments per Edwin Black'shistorical studies, which is why I don't get Haim's big divide betweenleft and right wing.

He insists we remember it was Hitler's socialist party that wasuber-stupid (i.e. lefty) but most leftists associate the Third Reichwith big business fantasies of world domination. The Nazis weren'tLeninists, that much is certain.

The lefties are more likely to lionize the Spanish in their fightagainst fascism.

Yet in the UK, young men who joined the resistance against Franco,Hitler and Mussolini were considered somehow unpatriotic by rightistwriters (I'm thinking of a guy named Cornish in particular who isactually Australian). How does that work again?

I just don't find the left-right spectrum all that coherent sometimes,like a story that doesn't cross-check with itself. Too manyinconsistencies.

There's this guy George Walford who wrote about 'systematic ideology'in an effort to collate and categorize the ideologies and chroniclehow they morph into each other over time. http://gwiep.net/wp/ Hisclique might have been the ones to first identify how far left and farright tend to merge at their extremes. But then Jungians talked aboutthe unity of opposites and Blake about the marriage of heaven andhell... so I guess I'm into deep waters with these questions, shouldprobably just sleep on it.